A tattered burlap tunic. Mismatched footwear. The stench of manure. The calloused hands of a laborer. Sikras scanned the ground for a second body, a third, a fourth. There were many, felled easily by the skilled hands of Saelihn’s soldiers. Every corpse who the Red Sentinel had brought down confirmed his suspicions.
These were no knights, no paladins, no rangers, no trained men and women of war. These were commonfolk. Farmers, fishermen, bakers, cobblers, weavers. Explosives, coupled with the darkness in which they had arrived, amplified their intimidation, but when stripped of the shadows’ mystery, he saw them for what they were: no more fit to wield a blade than a child.
Surely the Red Sentinel would make short work of the rest.
And they did.
Sikras outstretched a hand, a silent request for aid. With Benjamin’s assistance, he stood. Caught his breath. Waited for his body to filter the nausea left from magical recoil. What felt like a century was likely only a minute or two. Somewhere in the distance, a horn bellowed. He recognized the sound from old battles won—the prevailing signal of victory over the enemy.
With a sweep of his hand, the two remaining shadow blades vanished. Only the fatigue of battle remained—which was particularly annoying given how little he had participated. Four short years ago, the thaumaturgic backlash would’ve felt like tiny pinches. Today he felt like an angry horse had kicked him in the chest.
Sikras slicked the sweat from his face and rounded his shoulders. “We should see if they left anyone alive. It’s the only way we’ll know for sure if these people have ties to Vessik.”
“Really?Ifthese people have ties to Vessik?” Benjamin stooped to pluck a sun-bleached skull from a fallen, undead minion. “How many necromancers do you think are skulking around our kingdom? I know you make it look fun, but I assure you, it’s not a popular career path.”
“Okay, fine. It’s obviously Vessik. But what are all these townsfolk doing fighting alongside his undead? And how did he raise so many? Vessik could scarcely raise two or three corpses throughout the course of our apprenticeship. Never mind the technical skill required to pull that off, but how would he survive that much thaumaturgic recoil?”
“Moreover,” Benjamin interjected, “why is he attacking Nyllmas now? And Vinepool, no less? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It might make more sense than I’d like to admit,” Sikras mumbled. The hypothesis made him cringe. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that Vessik had attacked them when Sikras had responded to Saelihn’s summons. Vessik must’ve had eyes on him this entire time. Maybe it wasn’t the Druidic spies sent by Saelihn over the years; maybe those rats and birds belonged to his old friend. “Either he knows Saelihn forced our hands, and he wants to act before she convinces me to bring the full power of the Cat’s Eye upon him, or he’s amassed enough of an army to think I’m no longer a threat.”
Benjamin sheathed his sword. “Neither of those scenarios are comforting. How many untrained civilians does a guy need to mount an army threatening enough to revolt against the Cat’s Eye?”
“In my current state? About three.”
Emerging from the dark coated in blood, Rowan marched toward Sikras, an accusatory finger thrusted outward. “How many more of Nyllmas’s people have to die before you do your job?”
“Oh, Rowan. Good. You survived.” Cynicism coated each word as Sikras rotated his stiff shoulder and shrugged. “If it’ll make you feel better, these people needn’t stay dead. Their valiant return is but a whispered spell away.”
“You’d joke at a time like this? Disgusting.” Rowan removed his helm and wiped his face, smearing blood and sweat into his beard. “They didn’t have to die. You could’ve ended this fight in thirty seconds.”
“As opposed to the forty-five seconds it took the R.S. to do it? Look around,” Sikras said. “You obliterated these people. We couldn’t have lost that many.”
“Even one lost life is one more than we should’ve parted with,” the banneret whispered, ears burning red. A muscle twitched beneath his eye, and it looked as if he might say something else. Instead, he clenched his jaw and stormed off.
In the distance, mothers and fathers cried out for their children. A freshly made widower wept for his spouse. The sound reverberated through Sikras with an all-too-unpleasant familiarity, and Rowan’s words suddenly burned with a truth he didn’t care for.
Benjamin tilted his head. “Hey. You okay?”
“Benjamin?”
“Yes?”
A heavy sigh blew through Sikras’s lips as he buried the unpleasant feelings. When no trace of emotion remained, he donned a false smile. “Do you think Saelihn will knock down some of my debt if I volunteer to clean up these bodies?”
“Clean up bodies?” Benjamin crossed his arms. “You shrieked at the sight of a severed head.”
“I didn’t shriek.”
“You punted it back into the fray like it was one of those balls kids try to kick into those little nets for points.”
“I was startled,” Sikras retorted. “Obviously dead bodies don’t scare me.”
“No, but severed heads sure do.”
“Catseye!” Helspira’s voice rang out as she shoved a battered man forward, his arms forced behind his back. “You said you needed a living body to interrogate for information on Vessik, right?”
Sikras smiled as she emerged from the shadows. “How fortunate. For us, not him.”
